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Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries
damienhunter notes a Wired story on the power-hungry ways of the first generation of Blu-ray players coming soon to a laptop near you. "With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook... But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say."
I wonder....
No sig today...
Because _nobody_ would have known in advance that decoding 25mbit+ of 1920x1080 h264 (a task that redlines even dual core desktop cpus) could be a battery consuming activity.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I don't know, my new computer here looks fi
Just plug the power in, rip the movies to your hard disk, and take the disc out. Last time I checked, you could get a pretty good HD quality movie down to about 8GB with Divx, without any real quality drop.
Blu-ray discs have optional support for "Managed copy". For those discs that enable it, there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play. The user can build a library of stored content while the laptop is plugged in, and then watch it when it's not. Supporting this feature would also beat carrying around discs everywhere. I can honestly say I've used my laptops to watch full DVDs four or five times in the entire time I've had the capability, it's just not as practical as it appears, and I hate taking discs on vacation with me that I might lose.
HD DVD made "managed copy" mandatory for discs with DRM, but, alas, it's Blu-ray that's the remaining widely supported HD disc format. (I'm not calling it the victor, it still has to beat downloads, and SD.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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Perhaps this is finally the sort of problem that will stur average joe consumer to be dissatisfied with the state of current battery technology, stirring innovation? Personally, I can't wait for Mr. Fusion in my laptop. My kids would all be the next WWE superstars with those kinds of irradiated swimmers in my loins.
mmm...muffins
Even when my battery was new, I still wouldn't get more than 3/4 of the way through a DVD before having to plug in.
Low end laptops never could play through a complete movie, regardless of whether it was on DVD or Blu Ray.
It doesn't matter how much power Blu Ray consumes - there will always be a laptop manufacturer who skimps on the battery to cut costs. If you want to watch movies on a portable device, you have to buy a personal media player. Sad, but true.
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Since HD DVD used the same lasers and the same compression codecs I believe this would have applied to HD DVD also. This is not a case of "if only HD-DVD had won" but a basic technology problem.
If the laser in a Blu-ray drive uses remotely as much as your CPU or LCD backlight, you're going to be burning a hole through your laptop in just a few minutes... Where does the media go to always find these moronic analysts?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Is there any reason a high power laser is needed for reading? Writing may have a power requirement but I would have thought that to read a disk you could make up for a lowered power laser with a higher sensitivity detector.
New higher capacity optical storage medium takes more power to use?
CD-ROM then CD-RW then DVD then DVD-RW/RAM and now BR... each step started with high power requirements and weren't suited for mobile use. And almost every one of them was met with this kind of fud. After evolution of the technology we seem to be surviving just fine with our current optical medium.
It's just going to take a few revs. of hardware improvements.
As for HD Video playback... well, that's another problem - just the shear size of data needed to be decrypted and decoded... ouch.
Another disaster of DRM is the power required to do all the decryption. Al Gore should go after the media industry for the waste of electricity and subsequent carbon foot print. While he's at it... Why not pressure HD-DVD hardware makers to release the (non-encryption related) specs of the machines on the market so they can be turned into MythTVs and other devices?
Then he can attack the printer manufacturers for adopting a printer & and ink/toner pricing plan that encourages the consumers to through away printers because it's cheaper to buy a new one than to refill it.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
Interesting... I wonder how HD-DVD and Blu-Ray compare in this regard? Anybody know?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While I had the edit screen open and was talking to a colleague, someone else answered the question: no.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Last night I played Transformers 1080P Blu-ray rip (10GB MKV file) in my Vaio VGN-FZ340E.
I used "Media Player Classic" with latest K-lite codecs, using the just the stock battery and a medium power saving mode and everthing went fine for the entire movie.
Yes, playing this files may not be legal but I just don't see a better or legal way to do HD with my current hardware.
Same thing happens if you try to play a Blu-ray movie (Assuming you have a drive) with Linux.
Why on earth would you need to watch a High Def movie on your laptop? Laptop screens are so tiny. Even if you are using your laptop to play a movie on a bigger screen, like your 1080p 52 inch TV, I would assume there would be a power outlet near by.
"That sucks."
It's the same old story, to a point. The performance required to do a relatively simple job (play fullscreen video) in a new way (using HD content and a new storage medium) means that it becomes impractical without upgrades. I can remember having to tweak computers to be powerful enough to play MP3's without skipping, but there at least you had the advantage that the storage space saved compared to even the best-compressed formats of the time was phenomenal.
I freely admit that I absolutely do not "get" the HD fuss. It's the same thing we've had for years, with more pixels, that you can't reasonably see on a fair test past a certain distance (although I would say that on a high-res laptop you are more likely to spot the difference because of the unusually close eye-screen distance), with new storage formats, new compression, new software, new DRM and new performance characteristics... which are killing battery life. And, yes, eventually they'll start making "blu-ray acceleration cards" just like MPEG-acceleration, 3D-acceleration, etc., although in this day and age they're called "software on the GPU". But at the end of the day, you've gained little (a higher res that you might not be able to distinguish) for enormous performance increases.
Where's the advantage in it when a "Blu-ray" PC can still play the DVD's of previous years but at much, much less expense... if you can play a blu-ray for two hours or you can play MPEG-2 for six (while compiling stuff in the background without jerkiness) on the same machine, what are you going to end up using if you watch a lot of video on your laptop?
When I go away and know that I might want to view movies on my laptop (e.g. long trip staying in cheap hotels, stay over at a friends house etc), I take either DVD's, or I have a bunch of MPG's/AVI's/VOB's etc. on the laptop itself or on DVD-R's ahead of time. Quality isn't really the factor there and the advantage to having everything in a simple format that everyone can read easily and which doesn't tax the laptop is key.
It's another case of "laptop = general purpose computer, so let's turn it into a media centre and make it do everything". It's nice that it's CAPABLE of everything but you can't expect a portable device to do it all AND give you good performance at everything. Laptops are not even desktop-substitutes for most work (the times I have to explain this to people... it costs pounds to repair a broken desktop, hundreds to repair a broken laptop).
Let the early adopters waste their money. Even if Blu-Ray becomes the de-facto standard, I'd much rather just decrypt-to-disk and convert to a format that's easily readable, with extremely cheap media, that plays the video "good enough" for most things if I'm intending to carry it around with me. Much better 1 x DVD-R with a couple of full movies on it that I can watch one-after-the-other and make a backup copy for pennies than 1 x Blu-Ray that I can't give my friends with only a single movie on it that kills my batteries just watching it.
There was a time when I did exactly the same with DVD vs VCD - it's actually trivial to just copy several DVD's worth of movie/tv show to a DVD-R or even a CD-R and not worry about the quality. You're travelling - who cares whether it's HD or VCD-quality so long as you can tell what's going on without eyestrain?
This might be a good time for me to try to sit through Star Trek IV or Highlander 2 again.
Blu-Ray: making crappy old movies only half as crappy.
So if I want to watch a film all I have to do is pop it in and wait for 30GB of video to be encoded in to an 8GB Divx file. That only takes a few seconds, right?
Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries/i?
Blue-ray is like Viagra?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Transformers was one of the pivotal movies NOT available in blu-ray
ony DVD and HDDVD
the director was in the news quite a bit, heavily opposed to this decision by the studio
transformers still is unavailable on blu-ray- althought that is expected to change.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
And here's me, with no CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM or even BluRay. True it's an ultraportable laptop, so the things are neither needed nor desired. I could understand wanting BluRay in a multimedia laptop, but those things rape their batteries anyway. You want battery life away from the mains? Get an ultraportable. Simple.
(Oh, and I have a good music and video collection stored locally on the laptop)
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
I'm lucky to get an hour of battery life on my dv9000t with max power-save settings as it is. Playing a Blue-Ray movie? I might get through the opening credits...
HD BlueRay on a 19" screen?!? I cant see the difference on my 32" screen... talk about overkill
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
It's the decoding. H.264 in particular (which is getting to be rather favoured) but all the codecs on Blu-Ray take a ton of computation to decode. We are talking like 90% of both cores on a dual core CPU. That is what hits the battery really hard. Copying to a HD won't fix that.
What probably will start happening is some hardware acceleration of the process. The newer models of the nVidia 8800 series support hardware acceleration of the HD codecs and it apparently take a bunch of load off the CPU. Something like that could presumably be made to work in a laptop (maybe already has, I don't know about the mobile 8800 capabilities).
Sony manufactures batteries for several major laptop vendors. Follow the money.
If it truly has a vampiric effect on battery life, the battery will die, but rise again the next evening.
Bereft in deathly bloom
Alone in a darkened room
The count
Blu Laptop's dead
Undead undead undead
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Sorry, too much LDS in the sixt...
What do you call quicktime?
Would you consider quicktime a codec? Because other codecs can't decode it, so it must be its own codec. And it is a wrapper of codecs by definition.
If you don't consider quicktime a codec then you are an idiot and don't know what your talking about, so I don't know how you could consider yourself a "professional" in the field.
A codec by definition is a program that COdes and DECodes files.
Isn't a laptop with 1080 lines of resolution pretty rare? Will a 1050-line laptop scale the image or just crop it? I'd hope that there is a crop option, since the scaling would probably use even more CPU and degrade the image.
1080i is really 1920 x 1080 - while it's not quite common yet laptops shipping with higher resolution screens have been supporting that resolution (or a bit more).
Scaling though is a pretty lightweight effort for the system, especially compared to the decoding. You'd always have the image scale rather than crop, which is really way more desirable - the only reason pan & scan works is that someone is controlling which part of the film gets cropped off, you can't arbitrarily say the sides or the right or the left can be cropped and expect a movie to be watchable.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Rendering h.264 video in realtime is notoriously taxing on CPU's"
"(Score:-1, Insightful)"
heh.
90% of the movies I rent aren't available yet in HD, so "meh".
Actually 1080p on a 42" TV is pretty amazing - you can definitely see the difference between 720 and 1080 at 42". Right now about half of the 42" TVs I've been shopping for are 1080p. Go see it at a TV store where the staff are sufficiently not-dim-witted and actually connect all the HD TVs to HD sources.
1024-line laptops are common enough, but to display a wider picture than 4:3 aspect ratio you'll need to downsize the picture to 700 or even less. Only lamers crop off the ends.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Laptops with Blu-Ray have been available for a year now. What's with the "could be"? It should be pretty damn easy to test.
The cake is a pie
Blu-ray uses a 405nm laser while HD uses a 650nm laser. Photons emitted by the Blu-ray laser therefore will contain 60 percent more energy than the HD photons. Bottom line is that one would expect a shorter-wavelength laser would use more power, all other things being equal. Maybe blu-ray is the wrong format for laptops, though I don't know why anyone would want to watch a high-res movie on a little laptop screen anyway.
I'm guessing that this can't be generalized to everyone, but just as food for thought... I don't use my laptop's optical drive. In fact I wish it wasn't on here, it's deadweight, and a waste of space (perhaps a bigger battery?). I just as soon copy movies to my hard drive and play them from there (and if you can't do that with blueray yet, it's just one more reason not to use it)- or even over the network. Even if I did have a Blueray drive in this thing I'd probably never use it for movies- too noisy! I'm looking forward to the day when optical drive are no longer required for software installs and all of my content is on my solid state drive. Hopefully that's not too far off. I was so glad when floppy drive were finally banished, I don't miss them.
Now laptop manufacturers are forced to develop batteries that last longer because every laptop in at least midrange needs to be able to play movies. That means that these batteries will also become available at midrange prices. Ofcourse everybody here will RIP the BR discs on AC power and play them underway so unless you're stupid this isn't a problem.
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BFD. They make it seem like it's a Blu-ray only problem. I'm willing to bet HD-DVD would have been in the same boat if it had not died. Besides, decoding high def video isn't a low-power job. These people should shut up.
No, no. Don't underestimate the users.
BlueRay and HD-DVD are standards which means they are not going to change a lot in the future. MPEG4AVC/H264 and VC-1 are the current 2 codecs for those disc format, and will stay that way for the whole life of the medium, until the next standard appears.
On the other hand computers are quite evolutive and easily upgraded both in terms of software and hardware.
And I'm sure lot of people complained that MPEG-1 couldn't compress as well as DVDs' MPEG-2 and thus quality had to be degraded to shrink movies to fit into CD-Rs.
Then came MPEG4 (First microsoft's implementation, a.k.a DivX;-) 3.11, then other implementations) and the rest is history.
Today we already see some next gen codec being developed. Wavelet will probably be the way. We already have some motion compensated wavelets codecs like the opensource Dirac. And there are even more complex possibility like full 3D wavelet (Tarkin has been experimenting in that direction. It has been currently put on hold to concentrate on Theora - because currently that one is good enough. But it's very likely that once the need for better compression arises, there will be again an incentive to work on such advanced compression algorithms).
Those wavelet technologies will probably play the role that MP3 played with music and MPEG-4 (mainly DivX and similar) played with older DVD formats, in shrinking media to smaller sizes. Which is actually good, because it'll enable users to take their movie libraries with them when on trips.
Also with the development of technologies like GPGPU will probably help bridge the gap between fully hardware acceleration by highly specialized circuits for popular standard formats like H264 or VC-1, and slow software implementation of more recent and less widespread experimentl ones.
People can do it. Bittorrent has the capability to handle such huge files. It's already popular to download full seasons of TV series of such sizes.
The only problem will be 3rd world countries that don't have such a high speed networks, and USA where ISP have oversold the actual available bandwidth in "unlimited" plans and are now limiting the peer-2-peer traffic of their user to make up for the difference.
But here in Europe transferring dozens of gigabytes is a reality. I personally use OpenSUSE Linux (which comes on a couple of DVDs) and Debian (which comes on even more DVDs). Their installation ISOs total for several dozens of GB, but I managed to download them flawlessly using bittorrent, even if here Switzerland is known to be slightly behind in terms of bandwidth.
And in Japan it's probably even easier for them with the much higher speed internet connections.
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Kate Beckinsale can suck the power out of my battery anyday!
/DVD Vampire!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.